CEE Tech News 001

What’s new on the Central and Eastern European Tech Scene?

The CEE Tech News periodic update is going to provide the most significant scene news, feeding off our obsession with Central and Eastern European success (and failure) stories.

• Cyprus-based Outfit7, developer of the popular TalkingTom, which also has offices in Slovenia, the UK and China, got acquired for $1 Billion by United Luck Consortium, a group of Asian private investors.
• Another exit story - Fitbit continues its series of acquistions with the Romanian smartwatch company Vector Watch (terms — undisclosed). Vector Watch had previously raised $12 Million in 3 funding rounds.
• Vladimir Koylazov, Founder of Bulgarian software company Chaos Group, is going to recieve an Oscar for Science and Technology. Chaos Group’s rendering technology called “V-Ray” brought realistic CGI effects in flicks such as X-Men: Apocalypse, Game of Thrones, Deadpool and many others.
• A new Pre-Seed VC fund launches out of Serbia. ICT Hub Ventures’ first fund totals €1 Million and aims to invest in aproximately 30 MVP-ready startups.
• The Turkish Fintech startup iyzico, offering 22 different payment solutions, raised $13M Series C Round led by Vostok Emerging Finance, with participation from International Finance Corporation and 212,the latter leading the Series A and Series B funding rounds.
• Russian Internet conglomerate Mail.ru is taking over operations and publishing of Crytek’s multiplayer video game Warface. The game which was developed by Crytek Kiev in 2013 is going to be led by My.com (Mail.ru’s international branch) starting next month.

It’s definitely interesting to see how the CEE tech scene is going to evolve in 2017 after a record-breaking 2016 (EUR 16.2 Billion, 11.7% up y-o-y) and what seems to be a solid start to the new year.

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